The Weird, the New Age, and the Strange.

Menu

Knowing your threshold

This one is short and sweet. I’m reading Stephen King’s IT for reasons I’m still not sure. I think it is because I like his writing and I hate myself. Well, I mean I know I hate myself.

Moving on.

I pick large books curious to see how an author can continue to write after page twelve. Sadly, when I’m writing fiction, that’s the magic number where I either decide to keep going or throw what I’ve been working on in the trash and call it a day. Twelve pages, to some, is a whole lot of nothing, but to me, if I can’t seem to find the right fit at that number, then I know I’m finished.

Knowing your threshold is something that I think we should all be aware of. If you’re not sure if you have a threshold, go back and look at all the things that you have written but not finished (THAT’S EVERYTHING FOR ME) and see what page number you’re stopping. If it’s all over the place, average them out. Then you take that number and the next project you work on, when you get to that number, take a moment to see if this project is worth pursuing. This way, you can decide to keep going or stop.

We are here for a short while and many of us have a limited amount of time to spend working. I’ve been guilty of writing a hundred pages on a project realizing that it was going nowhere. And though you do learn something from those mistakes, I think having a threshold is healthy. That way we avoid getting bogged down, because that opens the door for a writer to hate themselves, and self-hate is the most destructive aspects that anyone can have.